Beyond temple walls: Northwestern students reflect on a spiritual shift in American pop culture

Claire Coffey, Assistant City Editor

February 26, 2026

The Daily Northwestern · Beyond temple walls: Northwestern students reflect on a spiritual shift in American pop culture

The Church of Latter-day Saints has found a foothold in modern pop culture, but how do current and former members feel about this rise to fame?

CLAIRE COFFEY: What do Twilight and dirty sodas have in common? The answer reflects a rather spiritual shift in American pop culture. The Church of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon church, has been prevalent in our books, products and For You pages in recent years. But what does it mean for aspects of a religion to become trendy? And how does that impact its followers?

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From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Claire Coffey. This is Podculture, a podcast about arts and culture on campus and beyond.

[Sermon] Strong drinks are not for the belly, but for the washing of our bodies … And again, tobacco is not for the body, neither for the belly and is not good for man … and again, hot drinks are not for the body or belly.

CLAIRE COFFEY: Those were a few of the Doctrine and Covenants from the Church’s Word of Wisdom, which have long barred members from consuming tobacco and “strong,” “hot” drinks such as alcohol, coffee and tea.

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Utah-based soda chain Swig’s viral “dirty sodas” have emerged as a holy alternative. Cookie empire Crumbl has seen similar success beyond Utah with its ubiquitous pink boxes and massive frosted cookies. Swig and Crumbl may symbolize a religiously regional food turned viral, but media about the LDS Church feature its members and doctrine more prominently.

First-year English master’s student Samantha Stewart is a practicing LDS member who is also involved with the Association for Mormon Letters, an academic group dedicated to archiving and analyzing pop culture representation of the Church over the last 200 years.

SAMANTHA STEWART: The overwhelming majority of it is wildly misleading.

CLAIRE COFFEY: The YA “Twilight” saga by Stephenie Meyer, for example, offers an enticing combination of supernatural romance and Mormon influence. While none of the “Twilight” characters identify as LDS, in a 2005 interview with Mormon book blog “A Motley Vision,” Meyers said she incorporates her personal beliefs as an LDS member into her writing.

Countless academic articles and dissertations have since been written about this connection.

For example, in her master’s dissertation for Skidmore College in 2005, Karen Smyth argued that Twilight “mirror(ed) religious conversion.”

The “Twilight” series features a love story between Meyer’s 17-year-old protagonist, Bella Swan, and an immortal vampire, Edward Cullen.

Smyth wrote, “As soon as Bella realizes Edward is a vampire, she wishes for nothing else but to become one and live with him forever; she is literally converting to his religion, to push the metaphor.”

Stewart said she has qualms about Bella’s role in Twilight as well as the depiction of other LDS women in popular Mormon media. In particular, she mentioned the breakout success of Hulu’s “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” docuseries. It follows the scandal surrounding a group of LDS mothers challenging Church gender roles through their work as social media influencers.

SAMANTHA STEWART: I feel like not only does it turn attention onto our church, but it turns attention onto women in our church and the role of women.  But in a really frustrating way, right? Because to Stephanie Meyer and her protagonist, Bella Swan, to the people in these reality shows, the women are often very male-centered, and not particularly personally ambitious or intellectual.

CLAIRE COFFEY: Independent Mormon-identifying influencers have also spearheaded the export of LDS culture into the American Consciousness.

Content creators Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm and Nara Smith found a niche producing “Tradwife” content — soothing videos showcasing from-scratch snacks and crafts made for their families in a perfect bubble of domesticity. The #Momtok influencers from “Secret Lives” found fame capturing motherhood and marriage through ring-light softened lenses. And the lifestyle vlogs of twins Brooklyn and Bailey McKnight, and their eight-member family, were cornerstones of Gen-Z’s internet upbringing. These LDS creators established the illusion of perfect, simple, beautiful lives born from perfect, happy, beautiful families. And audiences loved it.

Having grown up as an LDS member in Utah, Communication junior Savannah Patience said there is some truth in these depictions. The state’s distinct LDS culture is stricter than most parts of the country.

SAVANNAH PATIENCE: The people in the church in Utah are like super — they interpret things a lot more strictly. And I think that they also like, sort of just come up with more, like, strict rules. Like, even when you’re little, and you’re growing up, a lot of — if you’re not, if you’re a family that’s not in the church in Utah, like a lot of parents don’t want their kids hanging out with your kid. But that, like, doesn’t happen in other places, and that’s not coming from the doctrine or anything like that.

CLAIRE COFFEY: Patience said that as she grew older, a disconnect between her community’s rigid values and her own beliefs eventually led her to split from the Church.

SAVANNAH PATIENCE: I kind of decided to kind of move away from it, because I just realized that like, I was in it just because of the people around me, and ’cause my family and everything that. And I realized that there were so many things that I just didn’t agree with or didn’t believe were true. And I just — it got to a point that there were so many of those that I just couldn’t ignore them.

CLAIRE COFFEY: Stewart said the homogenous depictions of LDS life and womanhood proliferating social media can be frustrating.

SAMANTHA STEWART: As someone who has been a lifelong member of the church and has never, ever, lived in Utah, it can be exasperating.

CLAIRE COFFEY: Nearly 70% of Mormons in the U.S. reside in the country’s western half, according to a Pew Research Center study published in 2025. However, Stewart said the stereotypes of “Utah Mormon Americans” do not represent the Church at large.

SAMANTHA STEWART: What a member of the church looks like tends to be what a member of anyone in that town would look like.

CLAIRE COFFEY: Communication senior Laura Fajardo-Riascos added that so much of one’s religious identity is based on their individual relationship to their faith.

LAURA FAJARDO-RIASCOS: I really wish people would realize that being a part of the Church doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re ultraconservative and that you necessarily ascribe to all of the beliefs. 

CLAIRE COFFEY: Growing up in a Spanish-speaking branch that primarily served the immigrant community, Fajardo-Riascos said her unique LDS experience shaped her relationship with her faith community.

LAURA FAJARDO-RIASCOS: It seems like the church is a very intense sort of thing. And that’s not necessarily true. I feel like this, the same way as many other religions are, you can choose how that shapes who you are.

CLAIRE COFFEY: Other appearances of the LDS Church in mainstream pop culture often feature the darker, more extreme sides of the religion. Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction novel “Under the Banner of Heaven” investigated a double murder committed by LDS fundamentalists. It topped charts when it debuted in 2003 and was later adapted as a Hulu docuseries in 2022. Last February, Hulu also developed a series about the chilling child abuse charges against former family content creator and devout church member Ruby Franke.

LAURA FAJARDO-RIASCOS: It’s a little horrifying, honestly, to see these, to see, Mormonism in pop culture, because a lot of the times it’s representing the worst of it. A lot of the stereotypes and stuff that people ask me — like, polygamy and like, I don’t know, like just being super whitewashed and all this stuff and like low-key racism —  I’m like, ‘Yeah, that happens, but the same, at the same rate that it happens in just about every religion.’ There’s a really awful twisted part of it, but there’s a lot of it that’s really, really good.

CLAIRE COFFEY: Patience added that emphasizing the sinister aspects of the LDS Church misconstrues how individual members practice their faith.

SAVANNAH PATIENCE: I’ve seen so much of people saying the Mormon church is a cult or like, I don’t know, just talking about the people in the church are brainwashed — stuff like that. And I don’t agree with that either. I definitely don’t think it’s a cult. I think it’s a religion.

CLAIRE COFFEY: Fajardo-Riascos had a similar impression of the Church from her upbringing.

LAURA FAJARDO-RIASCOS: The idea of becoming a good person, becoming a person, part of a community, learning to serve with good intentions and stuff like that, I learned the majority of that through the LDS Church. And so there’s a lot of things that I don’t necessarily agree with with the church anymore. But at my core, I’m grateful for that experience. And I do believe that the person that I am is because of the Church.

CLAIRE COFFEY: While accurate representation of the LDS Church and its members may be few and far between, Stewart and Patience both agreed on one movie: The missionary horror film “Heretic.”

SAMANTHA STEWART: The representation in there wasn’t terrible. There are a couple things that I have serious issues with, but as a whole, that was the least bad representation, national market secular representation of the Church I have ever seen.

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CLAIRE COFFEY: From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Claire Coffey. Thanks for listening to another episode of Podculture. This episode was reported and produced by Claire Coffey.

The Audio Editor is Ruby Dowling. The Multimedia Managing Editors are Femi Horrall, Yong-Yu Huang and Jonah McClure. The Editor in Chief is Emily Lichty.

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